NO_COLOR not respected by spinner status text and permission-mode indicator
Status Open
Reported on v2.1.220
Maintainer reply None cached
Activity 0 comments · opened Jul 30, 2026
Setting env.NO_COLOR=1 in settings.json (or in the process environment directly)
correctly disables ANSI color for most of the UI, but two elements remain hardcoded
to yellow (ANSI color 3) regardless:
- The spinner status word shown while a request is in flight (e.g. "Thinking...")
- The permission-mode indicator line ending in "(shift+tab to cycle)"
Repro:
- claude-code version 2.1.220
TERM=xterm~/.claude/settings.jsoncontains"env": {"NO_COLOR": "1"}- Confirmed
NO_COLOR=1is present in the actual running process environment - All other previously-yellow text (diffs, tool output, etc.) correctly stopped
being colored under this config
- Only the two elements above remain yellow
Impact: on terminals with a light-yellow background/palette, this text is
unreadable, and there's currently no settings.json option to fix it (theme is a
fixed enum with no per-color override, and NO_COLOR reaches everything except
these two elements).
Expected: these two elements should honor NO_COLOR like the rest of the UI.